damn fire ants

[grumpyvette]

I build this nice garage and yesterday morning I find a BUNCH of FIRE ANTS in a line going under the door, now in FLORIDA WE HAVE ZILLIONS OF ANTS and I HATE THE LITTLE SNEAKY S.O.B.S., I look around and they are all over the place, but I can,t find whats attracting them?

off to the local home depot, I buy a pump up sprayer
a qt of concentrated SEVIN
a qt of concentrated DURSBAN
a qt of concentrated MALITHON
a qt of concentrated TRISEVIN
and 2 OZ bottle of PYRETHRIN EXTRACT
I dump about an ounce or more of each plus an ounce of dawn dish soap (to destroy surface tension) into the pump up sprayer and I fill it with water, I spray EVERY OUTSIDE SURFACE on the doors and the floors near the doors till they are totally soaked......and the total perimeter of the garage ,today I get up at 6 A.M. and there are what appears to be about 4-6 lbs of coffee grounds piled up near each door, I can,t believe theres that many dead ants......SO I re-spray heavily
,checking at 5 P.M. I find theres not an ANT to be found alive near the garage! .....GOT YOU LITTLE ^^&*&* S.O.B.s (yeah temp. victory but I feel like I made progress)
the wife says I went alittle overboard but shes never worked on her back under a car and had fire ants bite the %^&*& out of HER!

btw CONCENTRATED ON THE LABELS IS A $%^^& JOKE! most of the current stuff is like %5-10% and they call that CONCENTRATED, well compared to the crap thats got less than 1% active ingredients, maybe..

does anyone know where to purchase any decent strength, long lasting insecticides,like chlordane,we used to buy, if you read the labels on 99% of the current offered insecticides at places like home depot you'll usually see concentrations of active ingredients in the 1% or less range
Im getting damn tired of paying good money for what is effectively 99% water and 1% poison that totally degrades and looses its effect in under 3 months tops, (most last for a week or less) when I was a kid we put 1 oz of chlordane in a gallon of water with some dish soap liquid and sprayed in around the house perimeter in about a 2 ft wide barrier area.about twice a year and had zero ants after a day in the house

[Rich Z]

Yeah, I'm not real crazy about those little SOBs myself. We normally use Amdro to poison the next and seem to have had good success that way. I would say that there are a whole lot less fire ant mounds around here now than there was when we moved down here. At one point I was considering buying a few South American giant anteaters.....

You are right about the dilution effect on chemicals available to the public. I'm thinking it may be the companies coming to the realization that if their products are only partially effective, then you will have to buy MORE of it to get the job down. Basic marketing strategy, I suppose..... But I've noticed that defoliants don't seem to kill down to the roots any longer. Yeah, the plant will look dead, but next year it will be back again. Which means you need to buy more defoliant.

[Mark Dalton]

Rich makes a good point. At one time you could get Atrazine, an excellent weed killer, in a 40% concentrate off the shelf. Now it's only available in stores in a 4% concentrate. That just happened a couple of years ago. I'm not sure what's behind it (the EPA?) but it's sure a pain.